1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and a method for managing materials in a material yard on a construction site or the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
A material yard for temporarily storing materials used for the operations is provided in the vicinity of a construction or civil engineering operation site or the like. Generally, the material yard is divided into a plurality of yard sections, so that materials are classified in order to be stored according to operation steps and types of materials. However, such the material yard may extend for several hundred square meters depending on the site. In this case, conventionally, identification IDs for identifying the materials are manually checked when carrying in materials, and then the materials are classified to be stored according to those yard sections. In the case of stacking the materials, for example, non-target materials sometimes need to be located to another site when a target material is to be taken out. When shipping a target material, the material is retrieved by checking the identification ID at a database and a yard section where the material is located. However, this retrieval operation is required to visually find where a specific section is located and at which position within the section the material is located (because there is often no predetermined shelf or the like within the yard section). Therefore, in the case in which the material yard is vast, it is very difficult to find out the material rapidly.
Recently, in a method for managing such a carrying-in of article, a classification of article, a storage of article, and a carrying-out of article, the identification ID of article is read by means of a device with a non-contact tag such as a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), thereby managing the carrying-in, the classification, the storage, the carrying-out, and the like. In addition to reading of data at the time of carrying-in and carrying-out using such a non-contact tag, a system is devised to be notified through blinking of a guide lamp where an article is to be stored or is stored when information is sent from a carried terminal (see Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2001-233410, for example).
However, in the material yard on a construction site, civil engineering site, and the like, which is not clearly divided by shelves or the like, the stored articles vary from time to time, while positions where the articles are stored vary from time to time. In this case, in a system as described in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2001-233410, it is difficult to guide an operator by providing a fixed guide lamp. Furthermore, it may also be difficult to attach a non-contact tag to a material depending on type thereof.